The Best Movies of 2014

This was not a great year for film, particularly when compared to 2013. I’m not sure a single movie I saw would have cracked the top five of last year’s list. The summer blockbuster season was less disappointing than it’s frequently been of late, but the final quarter of the year was a considerable letdown. Don’t get me wrong: There were a lot of good movies this year, just not a lot of great ones. As always, the usual caveats apply: I wasn’t able to see every movie that I’d like to have seen, so absence from the list may suggest one I missed. (This is particularly true of documentaries, of which I missed many.) Finally, the particular order of the list changed several times over the course of its writing, and will doubtless continue changing in my head long after publication. Let’s get to it.

1. A Most Violent Year

Coming on the heels of Margin Call and All Is Lost, the movie establishes J.C. Chandor as perhaps the most talented American writer/director still operating largely beneath the public radar. An unexpected tale of corruption in the New York heating-oil industry in 1981, A Most Violent Year echoes the best of 1970s-era cinema, and is anchored by an astonishing, revelatory performance from Oscar Isaac.

2. Selma

Stately and powerful, Ava DuVernay’s immaculately focused snapshot from the civil rights movement and the life of Martin Luther King Jr. succeeds on every level. David Oyelowo (who also had roles this year in A Most Violent Year and Interstellar) is tremendous as Dr. King, and his supporting cast is uniformly excellent.

3. Birdman

In the end, I’m not persuaded there’s much there, but who cares? A film this inventive and stylish provides its own rationale. There are great performances across the board—especially by Edward Norton and Emma Stone—and if cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s Oscar win for Gravity last year causes him to be passed over this year, it only means the award no longer has meaning.

4. The Grand Budapest Hotel

At once among the daffiest of Wes Anderson’s films and his most somber to date. The stone-working tools hidden inside beautiful confections serve not merely as plot device, but as metaphor for the movie as a whole.

5. The Imitation Game

Winner of the biopic-about-a-genius-Brit runoff over The Theory of Everything. A conventional film, but a well-made one, with an extraordinary story to tell.

6. Boyhood

A very good movie, but one that relies on a gimmick it never quite transcends. Had it focused more on the parents played by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, and less on the boy played by Ellar Coltrane, it might have found itself with something more to say.

7. Gone Girl

A taut, well-oiled Hollywood thriller that never quite found the extra gear it needed to rise to the next level. Still, a wicked adaptation of a tricky book.

8. Ida

A portrait in miniature of a Polish nun seeking to uncover the fate of her Jewish parents during World War II. Elegant, understated, and beautifully shot.

9. Locke

Another small gem, consisting only of an hour and a half of a man making phone calls as he drives his car at night. Happily, that man is played by Tom Hardy, who gives one of the best performances of the year.

10. Noah

A crazy mishmash of a movie somehow held together by the unrelenting moral vision of director Darren Aronofsky and the all-in performance of Russell Crowe.

11. Foxcatcher

A meticulous film featuring three very strong performances, but one that nonetheless remains somewhat remote and clinical.

12. Interstellar

A secular Noah. There’s plenty wrong with Christopher Nolan’s space epic, but it’s impossible not to admire his ambition and extraordinary visual eye.